154. Genchitaofu Baguazhang's yinyang - 艮氣道福八卦掌の陰陽 (☲/☲)

The funny thing about living your own brand of truth, is that you get to a place where what we perceive as the ordinary collective reality we all share with each other, may in-fact seem to be a collective delusion we hold up to avoid seeing what is really going on. I use the conditional word ‘seem’, because for each and every one of us doing Baguazhang, whether by ourselves or in a group, we are all walking our Tao and trying to discover what that means. You do not have to be a Taoist to be walking your Tao. For the Tao is simply the way, the path, the direction you have chosen to walk. Some of you are lucky, in that you have resources available to help you cross the great nothingness from where you are to where you want to be. And some of us have the blessed fortitude of being somewhere, where things must be figured out through experiences that help us to comprehend with depth what it is all about. For me, and maybe also from time to time for you, experiences do occur that are just a little out of the ordinary. And these events rarely get shared with others because quite frankly they put us on the weirdish spectrum of life. Until, of course, we meet other fellow Baguazhang practitioners who have ‘been there done that’ and we feel good again to know that our path isn’t that lonely. Recently, I had the good fortune of catching up with fellow baguazhang master Sean, who practices and resides out of Bondi, the suburb famously known for Bondi Beach out in eastern Sydney. We met up in Chinatown one morning and he took me to a real old-fashioned Cantonese tea-shop stuck in 1970’s decor, where you can still get a Hong Kong Lai Cha for three dollars fifty. We ate lunch together and compared background notes. To which we both realised that while we live in very different places to each other, some experiences were similar enough that we could advise each other on how best to move forward in our inner development that leads to outer development. This meeting was actually our first time meeting face to face. And came about because while we were already connected via social media, it had never occurred to me that we were spiritual neighbours. Literally just a train ride away, and not far away overseas somewhere. Which is good, because I am at the stage in my development where physically connecting with other Baguazhang and Qigong masters is becoming a must like the neurons in the brain wiring up. To assist me on my path, over a decade ago I created eight new Baguazhang forms. One for each trigram or gua. The one that allows me to grow energetically upon the earthly plane in which we all exist is called the Genchitaofu 艮氣道福 Baguazhang 八卦掌. And it is my Gen gua 艮卦 form. In brief, it allows me to be the mountain itself so that I do not have to go to the mountain and the mountain does not have to come to me. If that makes any sense. For the more spiritually inclined, it means that my inner child is no longer an inner child. That which was an inner child of around 7 years old is now a 25 year old inner man. Whose growth will by the end of this year matching my outer age of 45 years old. But I digress… After our meeting, I mucked around for a little bit at my favourite Japanese bookstore: Kinokuniya before taking the train home. I boarded the train at Town Hall station. Riding the T9 red line to Epping which goes past Burwood. At Straithfield, the following station, the train stopped and the doors to the carriage I’m on opened. Normally, I don’t pay too much attention to who gets on and off, except that this time I heard a very loud thumping sound slowly being repeated with each second step of whomever was making it. Thump. Thump. I looked up and saw this young man with long blond dreadlocks in green robes slowly ascending the steps to the upper deck of the carriage of where I’m seated...